JBL SP150 Subwoofer
The company JBL keeps the branded handwriting even in the budget models that for a subwoofer means an American prowess, muscularity and the scale of sounding. JBL SP-150 has a volumetric, rectangular body made of solid MDF, covered with black matte wood grain film. The edges in its upper part are rounded that gives the appearance of the device a certain style. The cabinet stands on four high supports, providing a sufficient gap between the bottom, where an emitter with the diameter of 25 cm is mounted, and the surface of installation. 10 inches is the maximal size for the diffuser of dynamic heads, used in the models of this class, and manufactures in most cases choose 8 inches. A fairly large bass reflex port is placed on the frontal wall of the body and is closed with a decorative plastic insert of smart form with the company's logo. A bass-reflex acoustic design can be considered as the standard in this price segment. In addition, in the bottom part of the facade JBL SP-150 is decorated with two LEDs. If the supply of subwoofer is turned off but the plug is still connected to the network, they illuminate in red and when the device is turned on their color changes into blue. You can't shutdown this illumination that can be a problem in the cinema hall with a projector, where a complete darkness is important.
Switching arsenal of the device is thought out well. Low-level input is single here - LFE on RCA connector, but there is a full set of high-level terminals: two pairs of input ones and two pairs of output. Thus, it is implied to use SP-150 with AV-receiver as the part of home cinema system for serving LFE channel or as a part of 2.1 system, when co-ordination of the work of bass module lies on the crossover of subwoofer. The signs of budget models are spring terminals instead of usual screwed ones and also non-detachable power cable. However, JBL SP-150 offers a full set of settings - smooth regulations of amplification level and cutoff frequency of the crossover are added with phase switch and power control automatic cutout, which disables the device from network at the absence of useful signal at the input during a certain period of time. However, this automatic cutout, again traditionally for JBL, works all the time, and that's why when you exit standby mode there is only a hope on its speed work as a delay in the moment of arriving low-frequency signal is well audible.
The presence of bass reflex and the placement of the speaker at the bottom of the body largely determined a sound character of the device. JBL SP-150 fearlessly dived into the most serious bass depths, provided by soundtrack, not fearing to slip into distortion. To our satisfaction it was able to avoid it and only a slight hum in the overloaded moments sometimes reminded of the model's class. Typical for the devices with bass reflex amorphy appeared sometimes too - bass needed a bit more elasticity and rate of fire in stressed actions. However, these claims could be mostly made to subwoofers of higher class.
